Author: Dan Seeger

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Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Four

Dan Seeger

Befitting his status as a filmmaker approaching his octogenarian years, Ridley Scott is something of a throwback. Until The Martian, I didn’t realize just how far in Hollywood’s history his creative instincts lie. Since he made his feature directorial debut in the latter half of the second, Scott was easy to plop into the categories of the other auteurs from around that era, deeply informed by the greater artistic latitude afforded to those behind the camera. That he truly made his name with a pair of films that combined harder science fiction elements with more audience-friendly directness (as if George … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Four

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Now Playing: Hail, Caesar!

Dan Seeger

Much as I’m a devoted disciple of the work of the Coen brothers, I can admit there are all sorts of forecastable reasons to expect that a new film they’ve made might not quite work. The susceptibility to recurring flaws isn’t an automatic outcome of having such clear cinematic voices, but Joel and Ethan Coen have committed themselves so thoroughly to a bleakly comic outlook tinged with ironic detachment, a quality often conveyed with self-consciously rambunctious visuals, that certain predictable troubles can easily reoccur. Most noticeably, their viewpoint can manifest as a lack of sincerity that sets a narrative slamming into a … Continue reading Now Playing: Hail, Caesar!

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Top Ten Movies of 2015 – Number Five

Dan Seeger

While I remain fully committed to only judging a movie by the material to be found in its digital frames, from the first flicker of storytelling life to the moment the closing credits complete their upward crawl to oblivion, there are admittedly time when knowing details of a creative path can bestow an added shimmer to an already shining cinematic effort. Inside Out, director Pete Docter’s follow-up to the tremendous Up, is a grandly inventive achievement all on its own, depicting the inner life a young girl as a sort of workplace comedy, with simple emotions personified and going about the … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2015 – Number Five

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “Spirit in the Night”

Dan Seeger

These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. I’m going to indulge in a bit of inside information here, providing the super-secret DVD commentary track backstory on this particular entry of our long-running series. Shortly after lauching the “Top 40 Smash Taps” posts some four-and-a-half years ago, I sat down to write about “Spirits in the Night,” the second of three Top 40 singles charted by Manfred Mann’s Earth band. As I … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Spirit in the Night”

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College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 241 – 239

Dan Seeger

241. The Jesus and Mary Chain, “April Skies” “April Skies” stands as a little surprise within the Jesus and Mary Chain discography. This is not because of its sound, which is right in line with the chiming pop coated in light gothy, industrial buzz that the band had established on their debut album, Psychocandy. Instead, the unexpected element was the swell of chart success that greeted it, at least in the U.K. In the broader homeland of the Scottish group, “April Skies” was their first Top 10 song, indeed one of only two singles in the band’s career (to date, … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 241 – 239

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From the Archive: The Player

Dan Seeger

And here we are at the top of my list of the best films of 1992, at least at the time of our broadcast. As I note in the write-up, my on air cohort and I agreed on the title that deserved to be called the top cinematic offering of that year. In fact, that was remarkably commonplace through the years. Basically every time we talked about top films of any given year on the radio, we were in complete agreement about the #1 position, a trends that persisted at least a couple years past the end of the show. … Continue reading From the Archive: The Player

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One for Friday: M, “That’s the Way the Money Goes”

Dan Seeger

I’ve previously acknowledged my fascination for what I consider the secret history of rock ‘n’ roll. When I deploy that term I’m usually thinking of the multitude of bands that created music just as interesting and engaging as the stuff that wound up in the canon of classic rock, but were somehow left behind. There are other facets to that crazy diamond. For example, there are those bands that are the true one-hit wonders, registering a single song deeply into the public consciousness without some much as a glimmer of follow-up success. “Pop Musik,” officially the second single from the … Continue reading One for Friday: M, “That’s the Way the Money Goes”

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Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Six

Dan Seeger

I’m tempted to name Tangerine as the boldest film of the year, although not really for the reasons that might immediately seem the impetus for that praise. Yes, the film gives its primary focus to a pair of transexual women of color (Mya Taylor and Kitani Kiki Rodriguez), both sex workers in Los Angeles, with a side consideration of the Armenian diaspora in the same city. Across the board, these aren’t communities or topics that most filmmakers, even those who are proudly independent voices, are especially anxious to address. Yet, the immersive view of these populations isn’t what makes the … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Six

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Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Seven

Dan Seeger

The comparison to All the President’s Men is irresistible, only because it is so apt. With Spotlight, named after the investigative journalism unit at The Boston Globe, director Tom McCarthy traces the efforts of a team of dedicated reporters examining the pervasive sexual abuse of minors perpetrated by members of the Catholic clergy and the reprehensible cover-up of those crimes by the institutional powers within the Church. Like Alan J. Pakula’s sterling 1976 drama, Spotlight approaches its subject with a commitment to depicting the meticulous toil that goes into building a devastating, revelatory newspaper article of undeniable fact, essentially celebrating the … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2015 — Number Seven